What exactly it means to “feel the same” in this context? The same memories? No. The same plans? No. The same emotions? No.
Seems to me the “same” things are: (1) being a consciousness, and (2) having the traits that all humans have. In the latter sense we are the same to all humans, and in the former sense, we are the same to all conscious being.
But it seems like stretching the meaning of the word “same” extremely far, almost to its opposite.
What exactly it means to “feel the same” in this context? The same memories? No. The same plans? No. The same emotions? No.
Memories, plans, emotions and even qualities of what it feels like to be a general or specific human are all aspects I would bundle with an identity’s ‘situation’. For example, in philosophies that assert there is ‘one shared consciousness’, they don’t mean we all think the same thoughts or have the same plans.
Rather, there would be something in common with specifically the ways it feels on the inside to be an ‘I’, to be an observer looking out through all the details of their situation. There seems to be some sort of intuition (possibly false) that there is something qualitatively identical about any computation that results in feeling like you are person. (For example, it would feel different, and ‘identity’ would be different, if you instead were part of a hive mind, maybe.)
Exploiting this particular intuition, it can’t possibly matter if you’re copied and destroyed. The situational details are the same for a copy, and then the elusive second part (“identity”) is identical for everyone, including adjacent copies, and so they are the same.
...looking at it from the other way, if someone didn’t think a copy was identical, what part would be different? This thing is what I’m suggesting is the same for all persons.
in philosophies that assert there is ‘one shared consciousness’, they don’t mean we all think the same thoughts or have the same plans
So it’s like the same algorithm operating on different data?
On some level of abstraction this is both trivial and meaningless: at the bottom we all are just “particles following the same laws of physics”. The question is, can we make it more specific while it still remains true? How far?
if someone didn’t think a copy was identical, what part would be different? This thing is what I’m suggesting is the same for all persons.
So it’s like the same algorithm operating on different data?
To be clear, just the part about feeling like I’m “me”. I think it would feel very different to be an alien, but I expect I would feel the same way about being myself.
On some level of abstraction this is both trivial and meaningless: at the bottom we all are just “particles following the same laws of physics”
I agree about the triviality. Especially for the thesis that we all share one consciousness—that we are all a physical computation is both obvious and meaningless (everything is a physical computation) but it also means it doesn’t matter if that particular computation is displaced in space or time or copied—there’s nothing unique that doesn’t get carried over (if it’s true that all our senses of self are essentially the same computation).
What exactly it means to “feel the same” in this context? The same memories? No. The same plans? No. The same emotions? No.
Seems to me the “same” things are: (1) being a consciousness, and (2) having the traits that all humans have. In the latter sense we are the same to all humans, and in the former sense, we are the same to all conscious being.
But it seems like stretching the meaning of the word “same” extremely far, almost to its opposite.
Memories, plans, emotions and even qualities of what it feels like to be a general or specific human are all aspects I would bundle with an identity’s ‘situation’. For example, in philosophies that assert there is ‘one shared consciousness’, they don’t mean we all think the same thoughts or have the same plans.
Rather, there would be something in common with specifically the ways it feels on the inside to be an ‘I’, to be an observer looking out through all the details of their situation. There seems to be some sort of intuition (possibly false) that there is something qualitatively identical about any computation that results in feeling like you are person. (For example, it would feel different, and ‘identity’ would be different, if you instead were part of a hive mind, maybe.)
Exploiting this particular intuition, it can’t possibly matter if you’re copied and destroyed. The situational details are the same for a copy, and then the elusive second part (“identity”) is identical for everyone, including adjacent copies, and so they are the same.
...looking at it from the other way, if someone didn’t think a copy was identical, what part would be different? This thing is what I’m suggesting is the same for all persons.
So it’s like the same algorithm operating on different data?
On some level of abstraction this is both trivial and meaningless: at the bottom we all are just “particles following the same laws of physics”. The question is, can we make it more specific while it still remains true? How far?
That’s a great way to put it!
To be clear, just the part about feeling like I’m “me”. I think it would feel very different to be an alien, but I expect I would feel the same way about being myself.
I agree about the triviality. Especially for the thesis that we all share one consciousness—that we are all a physical computation is both obvious and meaningless (everything is a physical computation) but it also means it doesn’t matter if that particular computation is displaced in space or time or copied—there’s nothing unique that doesn’t get carried over (if it’s true that all our senses of self are essentially the same computation).